What’s the Truth About the First Thanksgiving? | 5 Minute Video
Should Americans celebrate Thanksgiving as a day of gratitude? Or should they mourn it as a day of guilt? Michael Medved, author of The American Miracle, shares the fascinating story of the first Thanksgiving.
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Script:
Food, football, and…oppression. That’s what Thanksgiving has come to mean to many Americans.
Back in 2007, Seattle public school officials made national news by describing the holiday as a “time of mourning” and a “bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal.”
This new narrative describes the Pilgrims as arrogant oppressors who fled persecution only to become persecutors themselves, depriving Native Americans of their land and their lives.
But this is wrong on every count.
First of all, the Pilgrims didn’t cross the ocean to flee persecution—or even England. They’d been living for over a decade in Holland, Europe’s most tolerant nation, and a haven for religious dissenters. Free from interference by the Church of England, they feared seduction—not persecution, worrying that their children would be corrupted by the materialistic Dutch culture.
That’s why they risked their dangerous 1620 voyage to a wilderness continent: not because they were running from oppression, but because they were running toward holiness—fulfilling a fateful mission to build an ideal Christian commonwealth.
They initially planned to plant this model society on the wild, wolf-infested island known to natives as Manhattan, but winds and tides blew them 250 miles off course, dumping the Mayflower on the frozen coast of Massachusetts.
Somehow, the Pilgrims saw their dire situation as a demonstration of providential power—especially after a giant wave picked up the flimsy boat of a scouting party on a stormy December night. The turbulent sea then deposited them safely—miraculously—on a little island within sight of the ideal location for their settlement. It was a deserted Indian village with cleared land, stored supplies of corn, and a reliable source of fresh water.
No, these supposedly cruel conquerors never actually invaded that village. Instead, they expressed a fervent desire to pay the natives for the dried corn they found, if only they could find someone to pay. But the former inhabitants had perished during three years of plague—probably smallpox—that immediately preceded the Pilgrims’ arrival.
One of the few survivors of that devastation turned up several months later to welcome the English newcomers. Against all odds, he proved to be the single human being on the continent best-suited to help the struggling settlers, since he spoke English and had already embraced Christianity.
For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/whats-truth-about-first-thanksgiving
source
https://youtu.be/GD3dgiDreGc?si=TP6WDN60s2KCa_hK TED video about Colombus
It reminds me of a saying I once heard. There is nothing so absurd that if you repeat it enough it will come true. Seattle schools should review the recorded history.
Thank you for making this!
Thank you for this wonderful video about Thanksgiving!
First thanksgiving in actual America was celebrated in 1575 in Florida, between Spaniards and the local Indians.
Why Christian commonwealth?
Thanksgiving 2023. Thankful for my wife and family and friends. And for God.
Do not support Prager U! I teach history and I use their videos to show my students what sugar coating history can do. 1)The enslavement of Native people was not uncommon at this time, so many were kidnapped for the slave trade by white people 2) Where do we think smallpox came from? 3) It was likely the Natives were not even invited to Thanksgiving and instead came on their own once they saw the celebration as they were regarded as savages because they were not Christian and thus unworthy and lesser than them 4) What happens after Thanksgiving? The breaking of treaties, massacre of Natives, taking land with no regard to the lives of the Natives? Doesn’t sound very Christian to me and yes it is something we should fell guilty for because guilt encourages action and awareness
Just imagine 5 deers showing up
Do your own research this is not thanksgiving
Ba video and lies
Thanks for some balance!
Apparently Inspired by the Bible? 😂 you took! The natives celebrated that way before the pilgrims arrived and yes the Pilgrims were contributors to the eradication of the native Americans.
You can sugar coating as much you want but we all know this is lie
God is love & sovereign.
https://youtu.be/uFfREh7G3ck?si=i3ZsEyvRaWL5u7uj
“We thank God for our homes and our food and our safety in a new land. We thank God for the opportunity to create a new world for freedom and justice.”
– Elder William Brewster
I’m just saying if the natives all want us off their land
We should get off the land
We are all Illegal immigrants the natives are not
source? this seems completely wrong.
If anyone has actually studied this period, you know that the pilgrims at Plymouth were too busy trying to keep from starving to do anything else. Their "adventurers" (investors) back in England constantly sent new colonists but never enough supplies, so they spent twenty years at the edge of starvation before they finally began to become somewhat prosperous, always considering that the solution was to rededicate themselves to God. It was central to their whole conduct. In fact, far from harassing the natives, the colonists were continuously plagued by roughians from other settlements just out for money and with no regard at all for the native populations with whom the Pilgrims had established amicable relations. They even joined the natives in trying to put down some of the worst of these men so that peace would once again prevail.
freeattle is full of wing nuts. that city is beyond saving
I mourn every thanksgiving.
That’s because the raiders can never seem to win a game.
Read this FACT & answer a SIMPLE QUESTION honestly please.
FACT: You thank a God for giving life to you & you also thank the same God for giving life to animals for you to take their lives & eat them.
SIMPLE QUESTION: Don't you see any hypocrisy, narcissism, ignorance & arrogance?
It's interesting how many lies are being taught as American History to our children. My wife's family traces directly to the original Plymouth colony. One of her ancestors was a step son of Governor Bradford. You see, his first wife was a casualty of that first brutal winter. Dame Southworth ne Carpenter had married a young aristocrat who had embraced the puritans' faith. He became a ribbon weaver. However, after only a few years of marriage and two sons, Mr Southworth died leaving Alice a widow. Bradford had been pursuing Alice before her marriage. She had also heard that Mrs. Bradford had died. So she wrote to him and the rest is history. Alice and her younger son, our ancestor, joined Governor Bradford in Plymouth Colony. The older son was taken by his Grandfather as he was the heir apparent. Alice's older son sold the estate when the old man died and joined his family in America some years later. I believe the younger son's name was Thomas and he married a passenger of the Mayflower's first voyage. The family history has a few things to say about the first Thanksgiving and later generations were involved with the push for the national holiday.
I found your depictions of the Native dwellings to be interesting. They were more like the Sioux Wigwams that my Grandmother's people used whilst hunting and gathering on the great plains. The Wampanoag people actually lived in a Cruck variety of timber framed houses very similar to homes in England. This very much surprised the Pilgrims. However there was little mystery of what happened to the natives who populated this village. They were scattered all over the area and in the buildings. Bradford commented on it in his writings about the discovery of the Village. The Pilgrims buried those they found. Actually, I wonder if they paid Squanto for what they found in the village as he would have been the last surviving heir of that estate. I understand the need of brevity in these videos. However perpetuating the mistaken idea that all natives lived in tents was a bad idea. I did get a laugh however at my Father's Sioux relatives standing in for the Wampanoags.
First Thanksgiving held at Berkeley Plantation just outside Jamestown, VA.
The "wild, wolf-infested island" of Manhattan already had a busy Dutch West Indies Company trading post, with more upstream on the Hudson and Delaware Rivers.
It seems that's not all Mr. Medved has wrong.
Squanto: The True Story Of The Native American Behind The First Thanksgiving
Published November 7, 2021
Updated October 5, 2022
As the last survivor of the Patuxet tribe, Squanto used his fluency in English and his unique relationship with the Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth to leave an indelible mark on American history.
According to the mythology behind the first Thanksgiving in 1621, the Pilgrims met a “friendly” Native American named Squanto in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, and the settlers enjoyed a hearty feast with their new native friend.
But the true story about Squanto — also known as Tisquantum — is far more complex than the version that schoolchildren have been learning for decades.
…….
At some point during his youth (in the early 1600s), Squanto was captured by English explorers and taken to Europe, where he was sold into slavery. The most widely-accepted theory is that Squanto and 23 other Native Americans boarded the ship of Captain Thomas Hunt, who put them at ease with promises of trade before setting sail.
Instead, the Natives were held captive aboard.
“This is not revisionist history,” said Wampanoag expert Paula Peters in an interview with Huffington Post. “This is history that’s just been overlooked because people have become very, very comfortable with the story of happy Pilgrims and friendly Indians. They’re very content with that — even to the point where no one really questioned how is it that Squanto knew how to speak perfect English when they came.”
The Patuxet people were outraged by the kidnappings, but there was nothing they could do. The Englishmen and their prisoners were long gone, and the remaining people of the village would soon be wiped out by disease.
Squanto and the other prisoners were likely sold by Hunt as slaves in Spain.
…..
(Squanto escaped captivity and found his way to England
…..
In 1619, (Capt. Thomas Dermer sailed) on a trade mission to the New England colonies and employed Squanto as an interpreter.
…..
Then, in 1620, Dermer and his crew were attacked by the Wampanoag tribe near modern Martha’s Vineyard. Dermer and 14 men managed to escape.
Meanwhile, Squanto was taken captive by the tribe — and he was longing for his freedom yet again.
In early 1621, Squanto found himself still a prisoner of the Wampanoag, who cautiously observed a group of recent English arrivals.
These Europeans had suffered grievously in the winter, but the Wampanoag were still hesitant to approach them, especially since Natives who attempted to befriend the English in the past had been taken captive instead.
Eventually, however, as Pilgrim William Bradford records, a Wampanoag named Samoset “came boldly amongst [a group of pilgrims] and spoke to them in broken English, which they could well understand but marveled at it.”
Samoset made conversation with the Pilgrims for a while before explaining there was another man “whose name was Squanto, a native of this place, who had been in England and could speak better English than himself.”
If the Pilgrims had been surprised by Samoset’s command of English, they must have been shocked beyond belief by Squanto’s mastery of the language, which would prove to be useful for both parties.
With the assistance of Squanto as interpreter, the Wampanoag chief Massasoit negotiated an alliance with the Pilgrims, with a promise not to harm each other. They also promised that they would aid each other in the event of an attack from another tribe.
Squanto worked hard to prove his value to the Pilgrims as not only a vital communicator but also an expert on resources.
So he taught them how to cultivate crops that would help them get through the next brutal winter. The Pilgrims were delighted to find that the corn and squash were easy to grow in the Massachusetts climate.
…..
While the Pilgrims could not have survived without Squanto, his motives for assisting them may have had less to do with good-heartedness than seeking a sense of security — and gaining more power than he ever had before.
Squanto quickly developed a reputation for being manipulative and power-hungry. At one point, the Pilgrims actually appointed another Native American advisor named Hobbamock to keep Squanto in check.
After all, it’s easy to imagine that he may have secretly wanted to seek revenge on a group of people who had once enslaved him. On top of that, Squanto was aware of how valuable he’d become to the Wampanoag as the Pilgrims’ closest ally.
As (Gov. Wm.)Bradford put it, Squanto “sought his own ends and played his own game.”
In short, he exploited the power his fluency in English had given him by threatening people who displeased him and demanding favors in return for appeasing the Pilgrims.
By 1622, according to Pilgrim Edward Winslow, Squanto had begun to spread lies among both the Native Americans and the Pilgrims:
“His course was to persuade the Indians [that] he could lead us to peace or war at his pleasure, and would oft threaten the Indians, sending them word in a private manner we were intended shortly to kill them, that thereby he might get gifts for himself, to work their peace; so that whereas divers [people] were wont to rely on Massosoit for protection, and resort to his abode, now they began to leave him and seek after Tisquantum [Squanto.]”
Perhaps the best way to understand Squanto’s point of view is to take a closer look his name, Tisquantum, which according to The Smithsonian, was most likely not the name he was actually given at birth.
Per The Smithsonian: “In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, ‘Hello, I’m the Wrath of God.'”
Squanto’s wrath finally caused him to overstep his bounds when he falsely claimed that Chief Massosoit had been plotting with enemy tribes, a lie that was quickly exposed. The Wampanoag people were enraged.
Squanto was then forced to take shelter with the Pilgrims who, although they had also become wary of him, refused to betray their ally by handing him over to certain death among the natives.
It proved to not matter, since in November 1622, Squanto succumbed to a fatal disease while visiting a Native-American settlement called Monomoy, near what is now modern day Pleasant Bay.
As Bradford’s journal recalls:
“In this place Squanto fell sick of an Indian fever, bleeding much at the nose (which the Indians take for a symptom of [impending] death) and within a few days died there; desiring the Governor [Bradford] to pray for him, that he might go to the Englishmens God in heaven, and bequeathed sundry of his things to the sundry of his English friends, as remembrance if his love, of whom they had a great loss.”
Squanto was later buried in an unmarked grave. To this day, no one knows exactly where his body rests.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/squanto
Lest you think that's the last word, there's more…
THE TRAGIC REAL-LIFE STORY OF SQUANTO
https://www.grunge.com/337639/the-tragic-real-life-story-of-squanto/
And…
Squanto
Squanto, also known as Tisquantum, was a Native American of the Patuxet tribe who acted as an interpreter and guide to the Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth during their first winter in the New World.
UPDATED: JUL 9, 2020
https://www.biography.com/history-culture/squanto
And…
Never mind. There are as many different versions of the story as there are links provided by an internet search. One thing seems sure, though: Medved's version is the most shallow and, therefore, least reliable of them all.
"Actually, Squanto was no more or less “noble” or “savage” than any of the colonists at Plymouth or any of the Wampanoag Confederacy. The natives of North America were far from the naïve and innocent nature-lovers or ignorant brutes later English narratives depict them as. They were as well acquainted with political intrigue as the Europeans; they simply conducted those intrigues differently."
https://www.worldhistory.org/Squanto/
This is 100% bollocks..
More than half of the Americans have no idea where America is or what a woman is. What else can be expected from them
Christian lies. Just like Christmas another holiday stolen from better men than they will ever be. They may have had days of giving thanks but never a holiday for Thanksgiving. That was from a Mr. Abraham Lincoln but the filth Christians at BS universities like this will never admit that and try their best to cover it up.
I never knew how God used Squanto to save the pilgrims. I like how they celebrated with the Indians with food and shooting games. Americans still love our food and guns, and many of us still are grateful to God for this most blessed nation. Many have gone far astray from seeking God, but many here still honor him. God has blessed America, and no athiest college professor can stop us from worshipping him.
Thank you for sharing the truth about this beloved holiday. It has always been my favorite, and will continue to be. I truly believe that the Thanksgiving haters want to get rid of it because they never want to acknowledge that their is a God, and they certainly would not want anyone worshipping Him. I believe, and I pray that they will too. Jesus is the only answer to the madness in this fallen world.